The Scottish passenger who tried to tried to force his way off a plane stuck on the JFK tarmac was motivated by nerves rather than boredom, his daughter said yesterday.

Robert McDonald, of Bellshill, a Glasgow suburb, was arrested Sunday when he allegedly attempted to open the emergency door of a Delta flight that had been waiting 2½ hours to take off.

“He’s quite a nervous man,” said his daughter Alison. “I think he panicked.”

McDonald was en route with his wife to Las Vegas.

Alison suspected her father’s claustrophobia acted up after he was “cooped up for that length of time.”

“It’s not that he was bored,” she said.

Alison said her father, a retired steelworker, had been to the United States many times and was used to flight problems. “My dad is a normal 60-year-old man who doesn’t drink and is not aggressive,” she said. “He must have had some kind of episode.”